Gary David Goldberg, Television Writer And Creator of ‘Family Ties,’ Dies at 68

Gary David Goldberg, a writer and producer who created warmhearted television shows, most notably “Family Ties,” a leading comedy of the 1980s that propelled Michael J. Fox to stardom, died on Saturday at his home in Montecito, Calif. He was 68.

The cause was brain cancer, said his daughter Shana Silveri.

Mr. Goldberg came to writing relatively late, after a peripatetic young adulthood in the 1960s and early ’70s that included dropping out of colleges, waiting tables in Greenwich Village, hitchhiking around the world with the woman who would become his wife and starting a day care center with her in Northern California.

The rebellious flower-child sensibility that informed these adventures was the spur for “Family Ties,” which captured the culture clash between parents of the hippie generation and their children growing up during the Reagan administration.

The show, broadcast on NBC from 1982 to 1989, was set in a suburban neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio, and focused on the Keatons: Steven and Elyse (Michael Gross and Meredith Baxter-Birney) and their children, Alex (Mr. Fox), a bright, earnest young Republican with a hunger for wealth; the fashion-obsessed Mallory (Justine Bateman); and Jennifer (Tina Yothers), the intellectually precocious little sister. (In later seasons, after Ms. Baxter-Birney’s pregnancy was incorporated into the show, the family added a fourth child, Andrew, played by Brian Bonsall.)

The pilot episode opened with the Keatons in their living room watching home movies of Steven and Elyse at a demonstration against the Vietnam War.

“That was history in the making,” Elyse explains. “There were people from every state in the union at that protest.”

“What were you protesting?” Alex asks. “Good grooming?”

Originally meant to focus on the parents, whom Mr. Goldberg said were based on him and his wife, the show became a vehicle for Mr. Fox, who was 21 when the show started. He soon earned the lead role in the 1985 hit film “Back to the Future.”

Mr. Fox was not the first choice for the “Family Ties” role — Matthew Broderick was — and even after his audition Mr. Goldberg did not want him for the part. It was only after the casting director, Judith Weiner, pestered Mr. Goldberg to see Mr. Fox again that the match was made.

“From that point on he was a tireless defender of me,” Mr. Fox said in a recent interview. As Mr. Fox became central to “Family Ties,” the show began dealing more with teenage issues than with parental ones. Some were serious; in one Emmy-winning episode, Alex went to a psychiatrist after a friend died in a car crash. But what made the show a success was that differences among the Keatons were settled in a loving manner. Like the Huxtables of “The Cosby Show,” which came along two seasons later, they were a happy family.

“I was interested in the dynamic of a couple that had been together long term, that were still very physically active and attracted to each other, a house where there was romance and where the parents’ relationship to the kids reflected expanded lanes of communication and represented the way families were changing,” Mr. Goldberg said in a 2007 interview for the Archive of American Television.

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Gary David GoldbergCreditKevin Winter/Getty Images

He added: “This father was not threatened by the growing power of his own children. They were trying to have a relationship that would continue into the future. His goal was not to show how he could control and coerce these kids. It was ruling by love. It was the power of love that kept everybody — and respect — which is more powerful than fear. I wanted to show those elements.”

Born in Brooklyn on June 25, 1944, Mr. Goldberg was known as Gary as a boy. He began using his middle name, David, as a professional affectation. “If I could get rid of it, I would,” he said.

Gary and his brother, Stanley, grew up in the Bensonhurst neighborhood. Their father, George, was a postal worker and their mother, Anne, a bookkeeper for her father’s hat company. Anne’s parents lived downstairs; his grandmother, Mr. Goldberg said, was the family’s most powerful member: the keeper of the TV, the telephone and, though she couldn’t drive, the car.

“So if you wanted to go anywhere, learn anything or talk to anybody, you had to go through her,” he said. He added, “Anything that happened to me that’s been good really goes back to Brooklyn and goes back to my grandmother’s apartment.”

He played basketball at Lafayette High School and earned an athletic scholarship to Brandeis University, but, an indifferent student, he never finished. He also attended Hofstra briefly. He finally graduated from San Diego State University in 1975.

In 1969, Mr. Goldberg was a waiter at the Village Gate in Manhattan when he met Diana Meehan, a flight attendant. The two eventually spent 14 months traveling, mostly penniless, accompanied by their dog, Ubu, for whom Mr. Goldberg later named his production company. When they returned they started the day care center, in Berkeley.

After two years they moved to Southern California, where, at San Diego State, a writing teacher helped Mr. Goldberg get jobs in television. He wrote comedy for “The Bob Newhart Show” and became a producer of the newspaper drama “Lou Grant,” starring Ed Asner, and “The Tony Randall Show,” a comedy in which Mr. Randall played a widowed judge.

Mr. Goldberg created other shows after “Family Ties,” most notably “Brooklyn Bridge,” a homage to his childhood that lasted two seasons in the early 1990s; and “Spin City,” created with Bill Lawrence, which reunited him with Mr. Fox, who played the deputy mayor to a dimwitted mayor of New York. It lasted six seasons, 1996 to 2002, the last of which featured Charlie Sheen in place of Mr. Fox.

Mr. Goldberg also produced the feature films “Dad” (1989), about a father-son reconciliation that starred Jack Lemmon and Ted Danson; “Bye Bye Love” (1995), with Paul Reiser, Matthew Modine and Randy Quaid as divorced men; and “Must Love Dogs” (2005), a romantic comedy with Diane Lane and John Cusack. He directed “Dad” and “Must Love Dogs.”

Mr. Goldberg and Ms. Meehan married in 1990. Besides his daughter Ms. Silveri, he is survived by his wife, his brother, his daughter Cailin Goldberg Meehan and three grandchildren.

“Gary is one of those guys who has no guile in him,” Mr. Fox said shortly before Mr. Goldberg’s death. “His work is a celebration, of life, of relationships, of small family moments. A line like, ‘Why are there two milks open in the fridge?’ You could tell it was from Gary, so well observed without being trite or sappy. I used to marvel at what brought him to this place of gentle, loving humor, this jock from Brooklyn who could craft this stuff.”

Correction:June 24, 2013

An earlier version of this obituary misstated the day Mr. Goldberg died. It was Saturday, not Sunday. It also misstated the role Michael J. Fox played in the series “Spin City.”It was deputy mayor, not the mayor’s chief of staff.

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